Supreme Kronos Group (UKG), a human sources administration provider, was strike by a ransomware assault previously this 7 days, the business confirmed.
Kronos Government Vice President Bob Hughes verified the incident in a weblog post released Monday. Hughes observed that the company turned mindful of the breach on Dec. 11 and that it experienced impacted the Kronos Personal Cloud, which includes UKG Workforce Central, UKG TeleStaff, Health care Extensions and Banking Scheduling Methods.
Hughes warned that whilst the enterprise was doing the job to tackle the incident, it could final result in Kronos Personal Cloud methods becoming impacted for “several months.”
The assault could have a common effect for numerous key providers, with UKG’s shoppers which includes Tesla, Marriott, Yamaha, Samsung, Revlon, The Container Retail outlet and Peet’s Espresso and Tea, amongst quite a few others.
“We deeply regret the affect this is acquiring on you, and we are continuing to acquire all acceptable steps to remediate the problem,” Hughes wrote. “We recognize the seriousness of this situation and will deliver one more update within just the future 24 several hours.”
Hughes wrote that Kronos was functioning with cybersecurity experts and experienced notified authorities of the breach.
The incident will come as organizations all over the world are scrambling to react to and remediate a vulnerability in Apache logging package log4j, which is getting explained by top rated experts as a single of the worst vulnerabilities they have noticed thanks to log4j currently being a essential ingredient in the methods of corporations worldwide. Destructive hackers, together with nation states, have been actively trying to exploit the vulnerability since its discovery late past 7 days.
When it was not immediately crystal clear if the ransomware attack on Kronos was joined to the log4j vulnerability, the business posted a recognize on its website that it was “aware” of the situation and was checking its techniques and 3rd-occasion software provide chain for any indications of compromise.
Ransomware assaults have been an expanding thorn in the aspect of safety specialists and have significantly spiked for the duration of the COVID-19 pandemic, with hospitals, overall health treatment groups and universities amongst individuals focused by hackers. Key attacks on Colonial Pipeline, meat producer JBS United states of america and IT firm Kaseya have also highlighted nationwide security threats posed by ongoing assaults.